


If I Loved You

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Carnival, Carousel au, F/M, First Kiss, has anyone seen that musical?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 21:27:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20712797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: Clarke is (was) a mill worker and Bellamy is (was) a carnival busker; their paths cross and they play a game of hypotheticals.





	If I Loved You

**Author's Note:**

> Based SO so heavily on the R+H musical Carousel, and their insanely incredible love song—If I Loved You. Please listen to the song, my favorite version is by Laura Osnes and Steven Pasquale.

Clarke didn’t mean to get the busker fired. 

She assumed he didn’t mean to get her fired, either, but it’d happened all the same. 

His mistake had been showing partiality to a mill worker, as opposed to wooing all the women who walked by the carnival; hers had been being out past the curfew the mill set in an attempt to show their workers were a respectable sort of women. 

Clarke made a face at the retreating back of the floormaster at the mill as he sauntered away. Jobs were hard to come by in this town, with the lull in the economy that followed the war. That, and the fact that men were back now, taking the jobs she and others had had when they were overseas. Maine was as fine a place as any to live, Clarke would admit, she just wished she had the bankroll to do it properly. On the bright side, now she’d have time to enjoy the long days of summer. 

The busker wasn’t taking the sacking quite so well, hurling expletives after his boss as the fair manager retreated. Clarke supposed she should feign shock, cover her ears to retain some pretense of propriety, but she’d heard worse and given worse with her coworkers at the mill. 

Ex-coworkers, now. 

As their previous employers faded into their respective distances, the sensory overload of the fair crept back in. The music from the bandstand, the laughter from the children on rides, the smell of caramel corn, thicker than even the scent of the sea. 

Clarke turned back towards the grounds, tilting her head up to look at the lights. This far north, electricity was still a marvel, and the glittering of the carousel seemed almost magical in the twilight. 

After a moment, she realized she was being watched, and lowered her head to look at the busker. 

Bellamy Blake. 

It was his job to travel with the carnival— flirt with women, enchant kids, cajole men, play the pied piper to bring as many as he could into the fairgrounds. There was a notoriety that came with the position; a good busker was supposed to be impartial, loud and dangerous. Clarke wouldn’t have described the man whose brown eyes looked intently at her with any of those adjectives. Maybe he presented that way, maybe he kept a job that way, but to her it seemed a clumsy sham, at best. 

When she met his eyes, Bellamy yanked his flat cap off his head. Dark curls bounced loose, and he rubbed his nose before covering them again with the hat. 

“So, tell me something,” he said, voice lower than the yelling he’d been employing all evening. Clarke wondered if it was husky from hoarseness, or if it was just a fortunate charm of his. 

“What’s that?”

“Aren’t you scared of me?”

She supposed she should be. Buskers really did have a reputation, but something in her told her that this one was different. Not softer, definitely not kinder or more proper, but nothing for her to be afraid of. 

She shrugged, looking back at the glimmering lights. “I’m not.”

Bellamy made a sound like he’d been expecting that, but still didn’t know what to do with it. “What’s your name? Clara? Claire something?”

“Clarke, actually,” she said, “Clarke Griffin.”

He whistled then, a bit of a song she might’ve heard from a ditty down at the docks, from the men pulling fish and crustaceans out of nets. 

“Well, Clarke Griffin,” Bellamy turned, looking back at the fair with her. She felt his arm next to hers, and was surprised they weren’t touching; that’s how close she could feel him. “Bet you’re sorry you didn’t leave with the rest of the factory girls who kept curfew.”

Clarke looked at the lights again, the yellow glow against the darkening evening sky and the way they flickered. “Not really.”

He let out a short breath that might’ve been a laugh. “You could still go, if you wanted.”

And she knew what he was asking, even though he wasn’t even posing a question. Follow the other girls home, back to the quarters she’d be asked to leave in the morning, the rooms provided for millworkers, beds stacked close like a hospital—or stay out. With him. 

“I could do that,” Clarke said, her feet not moving. 

They stood in silence for a moment, broken when a mother yelped as her young son wandered too close to them. The woman clutched her son into her petticoats, looking fearfully at Bellamy and then disdainfully at Clarke. 

Similarly, another couple clenched their hands in their pockets, careful around their purses.

Clarke knew it wasn’t funny, and it was far from laughable to want to protect your son or your wallet, but it was still ridiculous. She couldn’t think of a less threatening pair, although she’d grant that externally, they might not look the most circumspect. 

Bellamy’s face was shuttered, though. 

Clarke wondered what it’d do to a man, to have everyone think the worst of you, on sight. 

She tilted her head, thinking back to his earlier question. Why wasn’t she afraid of him?

“You couldn’t take my money, since I don’t have any,” she said conversationally, then she snorted. “Especially now, since I haven’t any, nor the means to get more.”

His mouth turned up slightly at her flat attempt at a joke. 

“But if I had a penny, you still couldn’t take it.”

Bellamy looked at her then, raised an eyebrow. 

“You’d ask me for it,” Clarke smiled. “And I’d give it to you.”

That seemed to complete the smile, and he shook his head. “What, you make a habit of giving money to men?”

“I don’t make a habit of giving much of anything to men.”

Bellamy huffed. “False humility doesn’t suit you.” 

Clarke looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know I had any.” 

“What, I’m supposed to believe you’ve never had a fellow to give something to?” 

Clarke fixed her skirt, prim as possible. “Whether you’re supposed to or not, you should, as it’s the truth.” 

Bellamy was looking at her, hard. “Never?”

“Never.”

“At all?”

“At all,” she said, but something gave her away. 

“Not even,” Bellamy broke off as a couple strolled by them, stumbling over the uneven ground, “someone to walk around, catch a sunset with?” 

Clarke pursed her lips. The someones she’d had she didn’t like to count as someones, but Bellamy wasn’t relenting. “Anyone can walk.” 

“So, where’d you walk?” 

“Nowhere special,” Clarke said, thinking of broken promises or different dreams. “Nothing worth remembering.” 

For a moment, it sat between them. 

“The woods then,” Bellamy decided. “Secluded and romantic, like you read in fairytale books.”

Clarke’s father was illiterate and her mother only read enough to read which of her extended family the war had claimed that week. “Hardly,” she said. 

“On the beach, then,” Bellamy said, and though Clarke guessed he was having another laugh at the expense of the cliche, memories of green eyes and sea foam flashed behind her eyes. She and Finn had been so happy that summer, but she hadn’t known yet…

“No,” she said sharply, wondering when the lights had gone from twinkling to garish. She turned from the lights of the carnival; maybe it was time to go home after all. Ripping off a bandage, all that. 

The gravel path that led away from the grounds crunched loudly under her feet, and Clarke realized there was another footfall in the small rocks. 

“Did you love him?” Bellamy asked from beside her, voice quieter. 

The woods were quiet on her left, the sea crashing on the rocks below, down the drop off to her right. 

“As best I knew how,” she mused. “But that wasn’t love.” 

Bellamy whistled again, and she recognized, this time, the sound from trainers around wild stallions, a soothing sound to calm the agitated. 

“Didn’t mean to make you run,” he said, almost apologetic. 

Clarke didn’t slow, but neither that nor her leaving in the first place, was his fault. “Have to get home anyways. Curfew or not, it’s late to be out.”

Bellamy looked up at the sky, darker now, away from the lights of the fair. “Not that late.” 

“Not for you,” Clarke muttered. “Must be nice, to not have to worry about being out late.”

“Ex-millworkers don’t have a curfew, same as ex-buskers.”

“It’s not the curfew,” Clarke sighed. They were at the top of a ridge, and she stopped, looking out over the sea. In the dark, she could still sea the white crests of foam over the waves. “If I were the marrying type, it’d be different.”

“You lost me.”

Of course she had; men didn’t have to think about things like this. “I’m not planning on marrying, but if I were, I could be out later, with whomever, because being married has a habit of erasing who you were before you’re with the man you marry. But I’m never going to marry, and girls who don’t marry have to be a little more particular.”

Bellamy seemed to mull that over. “So why do you think you won’t marry?”

“Why would I?” Clarke almost laughed. “A better question: why would someone else?”

“Marry you?”

“Sure. Out of everyone in town, in Maine, on the coast, anywhere.”

“I’m sure plenty would,” he said, and it struck Clarke that they were talking about marriage like a social event, perfectly impartial, just working through her options. “Depends on how  _ particular  _ you’re being.”

“I try not to be, except in necessity.”

Bellamy shrugged. “Okay, let’s say me. What if I were to say I’d marry you; you wouldn’t.”

Still impartial, Clarke reminded herself, just for argument’s sake. “If I loved you,” she kept her voice casual. “Of course I would.”

He turned to her, surprised. “You would?” he asked, doubt and humor thick on his voice.

Something in Clarke rebelled at that, at being told what she would or wouldn’t do, by someone she’d just met. Sure he’d travelled the country, probably spent hundreds of nights with millworkers up the coast, but that didn’t mean he knew her. “I would,” she insisted. “It wouldn’t make any difference who you were, or what you’d done; if I loved you.”

Bellamy looked back over the water. “How do you know what you’d do, how you’d feel, or anything, if you loved me?”

Clarke didn’t have anything to say to that.

Moonlight and the sea did not crystal-clear decisions make, but she just knew. Maybe it was that she knew herself, or something inside her recognized something in him, but she knew. 

“I don’t know,” she admitted. 

Bellamy hummed. 

“When I worked at the mill,” Clarke began slowly, thinking back of the crowded room, tired eyes, dirty hands, “weaving at the loom, I’d glaze over, staring at the roof. I’d think of the sky beyond it, the sea, the coast, the birds flying over both and over the mill, over me...the shuttle would get tangled in the threads, and the warp would get mixed with the woof. It’d be like that, I think, if I loved you.”

“But you don’t.” Bellamy’s voice was somehow quieter, deeper.

Clarke licked her lips, almost chastised. “No, I don’t.”

She looked over at Bellamy, and his brow was pursed, like he was confusing himself. 

“Somehow, though, I know how it’d be,” she said carefully. “If...I loved you, I’d try to say it. Time and again, try to tell you, but it’d be stuck. Like me in the mill, like the tangled shuttle, always just longing, mind above. Chances would pass, golden in retrospect, and…”

Clarke broke off, thinking of diverging paths in the woods, different dreams and different lives that couldn’t be lived together. Her past someones, who were never fully past. 

“And then you’d leave me,” she said, voice sounding certain. “Just be gone, one day, off in the mist of morning, and you’d never know how I loved you. If, um, I loved you.”

The air changed, blowing away from the cliff, and Clarke caught a new smell, delicate and sweet. Delighted, she turned, the treeline dark and indistinct in the moonlight, but the petals still distinguishable as they flitted through the air. 

“Cherry blossoms,” she breathed. “The wind must’ve bought them down; can you smell them?”

She held out her hands to catch a few petals, but the wind died. The pink drifted to the ground, away from her fingers. 

“Not much wind tonight,” Bellamy said, from beside her. Clarke wasn’t surprised he’d followed her from the cliff to among the grove, but she was surprised he was still there at all. 

“Hmm?”

“Hardly any wind, now. See, listen.”

She did.

And it was quiet. The fair was far, and away from the cliff, the ocean was muted too. 

Bellamy shook his head. “You can’t hear a sound, right, not leaves turning, or even the waves anymore, though tide’s coming in. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Wonder what?”

Bellamy reached up to a branch near him, shook it a bit. Cherry blossoms fell, and Clarke laughed almost instinctively, twirling in the middle of a petal shower. Bellamy was looking up too, but past the petals, past the trees, up into the sky. 

“There’s a hell of a lot of stars in the sky, and the sky’s so big that it makes the sea look small. Then we’re here. Two little people, next to the sea, next to the sky—we don’t matter at all.”

Clarke wasn’t looking at the sky anymore, nor the stars in it, just at Bellamy’s upturned face. He had a scar on his upper lip, and she wondered what it was from. The rest of his face was smooth, freckled from the sun but not leathered, and his jawline was set to be clenched, his eyebrows set to be furrowed. It was a nice face, a welcoming one, one that was used to anger. His eyes weren’t, though; despite the rest of the lines around his face, his eyes seemed almost...like the stars she was missing.

He looked down, then, and Clarke blinked. She didn’t know anybody like him, someone with the world both under his feet and on his shoulders. He looked at her and she looked back and Clarke wondered if he was holding his breath too. 

“You’re different,” he said, eventually. “We barely know each other, and you look at me like, I don’t know, like you trust me. Like you’ve already trusted me. Wonder what it’d be like.”

“What?” Clarke said, and her voice sounded breathless, even to her own ears. 

“Ah,” Bellamy dropped his hand from the branch, and as it released, a new wave of petals fell. “I know what it’d be like. Awful.”

Clarke laughed, surprised. “Okay?”

Bellamy laughed too. “Can you see me: shrunken down, pale, picking at my food and lovesick like any other guy. I’d trade the sweater for a collar and a tie, proper gentlemanly, if I loved you.”

He seemed to trip over the last words, like they’d surprised him, even as he worked his way to them.

“But you don’t,” Clarke reminded him.

“I don’t,” he agreed. Then he paused, eyes going back to the stars. “But it’d be the same for me, I think. If I loved you. Wanting to tell you, not knowing how, missing opportunities and chances until you found someone else who could tell you.”

Clarke looked skyward as well. What did he see in the heavens, in the sky that made him feel small, inconsequential? 

“I think I’m even less inclined to marry than you,” Bellamy said, and his voice almost sounded resentful. Like whatever he saw in the night sky made him bitter and defensive, and miss things he knew he shouldn’t. “Even if a girl were foolish enough to want to, I wouldn’t.”

“Guess we don’t have to worry about it, then.”

“Who’s worried?” Bellamy retorted, but it came back too quick. 

Clarke pursed her lips. She was worried, for one, and plenty. Worried about a man who cost her her job and yet who she couldn’t bear to think of in another town. Worried about how these emotions had come out of nowhere, worried about how she didn’t think she’d be able to look at carousels or cherry blossoms or anything, really, the same way.

“You’re right,” she said, and Bellamy’s head jerked over to her. Like he hadn’t wanted her to agree. 

“About there being no wind,” she amended. “The blossoms are just coming down by themselves, then. I guess it’s just their time.”

They fell slowly, in something of a dance, twinkling like the lights of the carousel. Clarke watched them in their descent, and through them, she saw him. 

The brusque busker, the longing stargazer.

The hopeful, the nihilist. 

Bellamy. 

She thought of the sky, the thousands of millions of stars in it, the sand and the sea that met it, the hundreds of miles stretched under the sky. She thought of gulls circling, and wool tangling, of all the words she and he would never say.

Of all the golden chances, Clarke realized, this was the clearest and purest. 

“If you loved me,” Clarke began, quickly, before she lost the nerve.

“If I did?”

“Morning and her mist are a long way away. You wouldn’t have to tell me.”

“I’d tell you,” he said. 

His voice was quiet but it was certain, and the cherry blossoms were falling and the scent of them was so sweet it was overwhelming, but then Bellamy was stepping through the rain of petals, boots on the pink carpet of flora, his hand found the back of her neck and he pulled her to him. 

He kissed her. 

He smelled like the carnival, like the salt of sea and sweat and smoke from spit fires and hocked goods. He tasted like someone who came off a 12-hour shift always did, like air instead of lunch and like hunger had slipped from stomach to soul. His lips moved over hers and she was the sky meeting the sea, the sea meeting the sand, the sand settling into rocks on the shore. 

His arms were around her and Clarke knew, in that moment, there was no longer an “if”. Just when, just his lips against hers, the unspoken, the surrender to the things they wouldn’t say, the roofs and sky they’d stare through, the golden chances they’d take, and keep taking, and the mist of day that was fast dissipating.


End file.
